Literary Magazines:
The NewPages
Literary Magazine Reviews
Edited by Denise Hill
Posted January 22, 2006
Carousel
Volume 18
Fall/Winter 2005-6
Biannual
In bookstores, the quirky and curious Carousel is filed under Literary or Visual Art. This international journal offers poems, cartoons, drawings, cartoon-like drawings, a few ads, mixed media, boobs, prose poems, a naked woman embracing a polar bear, charcoal watercolors, macabre big-faced drawings on graph paper, a list of phobias and more. The editors feel that Carousel's philosophies are "more directly in line with the expansive perspectives inherent in today’s global magazine culture." Oh. It is also a hard to categorize art-book featuring Canadian artists. The sole prose story, Renee Hartleib's "Cat and Mouse," introduces us to Brenda who asserts her independence by buying a house and moving away from her sheltering parents at the tender age of thirty. One day she returns home from work to find a drunken bum roosted on her porch, forcing her to confront him or call Daddy, "'It’s like a real job,' he says. '9 to 5, you know?'" Libby Hague's black and white charcoal water colors of animals are endearing; the pieces of man, as a boogeyman and clown, are outright creepy. The prose poem, "Still Life: Two Tourists at a Sidewalk Café" by Louisa Howerow exposes the artist's mind by questioning one frozen image. It could be about the woman who owns the café, or her sick husband or her son waiting on the lost tourist couple, "The story possibilities break off; everyone moves into action." Other pieces in Carousel have a similar feel: Mark Laliberte's "Drowning Cartoon" is an arm outstretched in ripples of water; Keith Jones's busy urban drawings suggest man's relationship with machines and his exploitation of his environment; Barbara Pelman's poem, "We Play Bridge," is a snapshot of a daughter observing her mother and the inevitable aging as they play cards. Carousel indeed. [Carousel, c/o UC 274, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1 Canada. E-mail: carouselbook@yahoo.ca. Single issue$9. www.carouselmagazine.ca] —R.T. Duffer
Conjunctions
Issue 45
2005
Biannual
There is something sinister about children (a
fact every Hollywood horror movie knows), with their made-up
languages, their hidden play spots and their games of Hangman. The
work in Conjunctions 45 makes good use of this, offering up a
thick portion of eeriness in their “Secret Lives of Children” issue.
Shelley Jackson starts the issue off with a dark and absurd vision
of a hangman game, whose title is a line sketch of a scaffold. There
are plenty of recognizable names here (Howard Norman, John Ashbery,
Robert Creeley) and plenty of unknowns. Robert Creeley’s six-page
poem “Caves” was my favorite piece, taking caves’ hiding spots as a
motif: “So much of my childhood seems / to have been spent in rooms-
/ at least in memory, the shades / pulled down to make it darker.”
Malinda Markham also offers up three excellent poems, “To Hunt in
This Landscape” especially. The most delightful surprise, however,
is a John Ashbery translation of a selection of Stéphane Mallarmé’s
musings on English nursery rhymes. Mallarmé taught these thoughts
alongside the nursery rhymes in his English classes, though his
responses read much more like prose-poems than explanations of
themes: “Everyone obeyed him, and when he said: ‘Quack! Quack!’ and
nothing more, the ship began to move. Do you see it now, that
beautiful ship? – Yes, Mother, in the land of fairy tales.”
[Conjunctions, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504. E-mail:
conjunctions@bard.edu. Single issue $15.
www.conjunctions.com]
—Lincoln Michel
Epoch
Volume 54 Number 3
2005 Series
Triannual
Self-described as having a “shrewd eye for talent,” the editors at Epoch, Cornell University’s literary journal, have again published an exceptional issue. Largely filled with short stories, this issue includes characters that are ordinary and empathetic, complex and endearing—believable, if difficult to understand. There’s something immensely satisfying when I finish a story and feel as though the world created in just a few short pages is utterly real, an element of life I may not have experienced but find authentic in voice and tone. Each story here is crafted with the utmost care, and the endings are resolved without force or artifice. If I had to choose a standout story, I’d pick “The Surprising Weight of the Body’s Organs” by Douglas Trevor, whose understanding of suffering and the extraordinary lengths we will go to mitigate our pain is acute and startling. The protagonist, a wife and mother who has lost her only child to disease, now procures donor organs but hides from her flatulent husband in airport bars as she travels from surgery to surgery. When confronted with the weight of her husband’s desire to reconcile, she recognizes the futility: “There were these tremors of rage inside of here that consumed her. It was out of her control. There were organs she needed to move around the country and rage she felt at the awful puniness of her ever-precious cargo. That was it. There was no room inside her for anything else.” While fiction is the highlight of this issue, the three poems included here are meritorious equals to the quality writing throughout. Reading page after page of satisfying prose, I felt envious of the writers and this venue. If I were to write a short story, I’d feel fortunate to see it printed in these pages. [Epoch, 251 Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. 14853. Single issue $5. www.arts.cornell.edu/english/epoch.html] —Jen Henderson
Lorraine
and James
Volume 1 Issue 1
2005
Triannual
The auspicious debut issue of Lorraine and
James compliments its diverse fiction with personal essays, some
poetry, one interview and a contributor’s page that offers a brief
explanation of the story’s inspiration and/or development. Mindful
of reader and writer, this curiosity for story demonstrates
Editor-in-Chief Jasai Madden’s intention to be a “conduit through
which a writer from anywhere will be able to connect to readers
everywhere.” There are folktales of love and satires on Hollywood,
religious parables and an ode to a dullard, poems as honest and
incisive as the personal essays that reveal more about people than
the single subject. In “Sweet Potatoes and Coconut” by Pamela
MacIsaac, a father must confront the upstairs neighbor’s idiot child
who dropped a rock on his head. His daughter returns to her mother
and the father must accept the life of a divorcee. Many of the
pieces in Lorraine and James share the tireless theme of broken
bonds. Debbie Ann Ice, in “Sculpting,” inverts that theme with her
poignantly convincing first-person telling of a wife and mother who
deals with her terminal non-Hotchkins lymphoma by preparing her
husband and two sons for her death without telling them of the
disease. There is a playfulness about Lorraine and James as
well, represented best by Rick Castaneda’s quirky string of
short-shorts, “Four Easy Pieces of Fiction.” The unrelated tales
include a thief who sells rich peoples’ keepsakes to lonely people,
a conjurer, a woman who chronically changes her personalized license
plate, and a love story about a couple inspired by commercials,
jingles, movies and songs, “The only trouble was the muzak, which
our brains began to associate with sex.” The evocative poem “The
Want Ads” reads like performance poetry, Britni Jackson’s voice
leaping from the page to your ear. From the slums of a Nigerian
motor park to the steps of a synagogue, “characters, neighborhoods
and instances too often out of range” are represented in Lorraine
and James. [Lorraine and James, 3727 W. Magnolia Blvd #406,
Burbank, CA 91505. E-mail: editor@lorraineandjames.com. Single
issue $12.
www.lorraineandjames.com] —R.T. Duffer
Me
Three
Issue 2
Fall 2005
Nimrod
Volume 49 Number 1
Fall/Winter 2005
Biannual
Of the 49 contributors in this issue of
Nimrod, 36 are finalists and semifinalists of its 27th annual
award issue, which is based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Four are for
the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction; 32 for the Pablo Neruda
Prize for Poetry. Numbers may not be the best introduction for their
venerated prize issue, yet it suggests the bloom of the varied,
evocative and penetrating contents: this is a journal to be slowly
ingested and savored. Anything this rich with poetry would have
plenty of elegies and homages to nature, but finalist Katherine
Case’s “Autumn” conjures the redolence of death and fall on the
page: “The air is rainwet / and skunky, as if we’re breathing in /
the world of trees, inhaling their darkest insides, / where smoky,
obsidian hearts sleep in slow / rhythm and ancient filaments curl /
through woody darkness…” Place and time are transcended and shed,
especially in “La Historia” by winner Patricia Caspers. Themes of
love and parents, of sex and gods, abound throughout the journal,
with too many memorable pieces to name, works that replay and remain
long beyond the power of the eyes. All five fiction pieces are
enduring first-person tellings, the top prize winners told from the
opposite gender of the author: Thomas Gough’s winning story,
“Idleness, Justice, Kingship and Love” introduces Louise, who has
moved into her friend Simon’s vacated church two days before the ‘04
presidential election. “In fact, the end was past (she says,
referring to her recent split with her husband), but we’re creatures
of habit, and the habit of late winter is hope.” Jen Larsen’s
narrator, in “What It Is You Know,” attends his estranged wife’s
funeral under a pall of pity and disconnected memories that won’t
answer why she left him. That unsettled feeling morphs into outright
creepiness in “The Prince of Darkness,” where Janette Turner
Hospital expertly understates the event that destroyed a family,
letting the reader infer everything from the fallout. [Nimrod, The
University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK 74104-3189. E-mail:
nimrod@utulsa.edu. Single issue $10.
www.utulsa.edu/nimrod]
—Rob Duffer
No:
a journal of the arts
Issue 4
2005
Biannual
Opium
Number 1
2005-6
Annual
Opiummagazine.com has taken its “literary humor for the deliriously captivated” into the print world. No.1, with an Eggersly subtitle, “A Whopping Collection of Fanatical Literary Brilliance,” retains the clever wit and sly characterizations of its daddy on-line journal, including estimated reading times. It could best be categorized by a random sampling of the titles: It is What Fiction, I Gave an Apple to my Teacher, Suicide Note, Modern Communication Techniques in Des Moines, New Doritos Flavors with a Limited Future and, of course, You Are Strange. Humor abounds in editor Todd Zuniga’s 250+page journal of stories, drawings, poems and axiomatic page dividers, like the one reminding you to call your mother. In “Fortune,” by David Barringer, a husband and wife discover a ‘misfortune’ in their Chinese cookie, supplant it with their own comic list, then get food poisoning and the awareness that “the planets of our children have eclipsed our love life.” “Insomnia for a Better Tomorrow” by Tao Lin begins with the petty disagreements of a doomed couple, which is funny, until Brian devolves into a hapless, feckless bundle of atoms held together by the muck of depression. There are memoirs that read like science-fiction, angry adolescent recollections that move at a horror movie pace, like “The Four Angries” by David Fromm. “The Night Salesman” by Nick Antosca is received by a drunken misfit who would attack the 2 a.m. salesman if he weren’t so drunk. One of Darby Hudson’s enjoyable drawings, “Tunnel,” explains: “confused man attempts to fuck a tunnel before being hit by an oncoming train.” Zuniga’s interview with novelist Amanda Filipacci demonstrates a dedication and passion for storytelling that pulses throughout the pages of Opium, where humble pathos underlies manic ethos, and non-sequitors get tangled in string theory. [E-mail: todd@opiummagazine.com. Single issue $10. www.OpiumMagazine.com] —Rob Duffer
The
Paris Review
Volume 47 Number 174
Summer 2005
Quarterly
In its 1953 inaugural issue, William Styron, best known for his novel Sophie’s Choice, wrote, “I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they're good.” And they are good. This issue finds Liao Yiwu a seeming star, as both interviewer and subject, covering an alarming 35 pages, or about 18% of the issue’s 192 pages. Yiwu’s pieces range from encounters with a professional mourner, an independent public toilet manager, and a human trafficker, with China serving as each interviews’ backdrop. Yiwu’s contender is Damon Galgut’s short story “The Follower,” at 44 pages (24%)—“Look for what. For maps with more detail.” Whether The Paris Review is playing favorites or just showcasing the talent they’re exposed to—both rightly, I might add—is unclear. What is clear, however, is the quality of writing between covers, the alarming variety, and its authors’ attentiveness to those aspects of ourselves which make us most human. Philip Gourevitch, author of 1999’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, took over the role as editor of The Paris Review, after one of the founders and premier editor George Plimpton’s death in 2003, and Brigid Hughes’s brief one-year editorial stint in 2004. Other notable features are an interview with Salmun Rushdie, a photo essay describing 1994 cease-fire Belfast, a fistful of poems by Dan Chiasson, and a curio wherein some of Elizabeth Bishop’s early and unpublished poems are placed en face of her original notebook entries. It isn’t too often that I pick up a relatively mainstream journal and am instantly and repeatedly attracted to it. This is one of those times. [The Paris Review, 62 White Street, New York, NY 10013. E-mail: queries@theparisreview.org. Single issue $12. www.theparisreview.org.] —Erin M. Bertram
POOL:
a journal of poetry
Volume 4
2005
Annual
“For genius, at least where poetry is
concerned, consists precisely in being faithful to freedom,” Dean
Young quotes from surrealist poet Yves Bonnefoy in the latest issue
of POOL. Although this quote comes from Amy Newlove
Schroeder’s interview with Young in the back pages of POOL,
it might as well be the magazine’s credo. From the Natasha Sajé’s
prose poem “B” to Jeff Chang’s “Things to Forget”—“Under the skin is
another layer. / We call this baby skin. // Under a baby’s skin, /
snowflakes.” – POOL is an experience of the freedom and
diversity of poetry. Published annually out of Los Angeles, editors
Patty Seyburn and Judith Taylor provide a cross-section of
contemporary American poetry. With poems that are surprising and at
the center of the zeitgeist, POOL reads like a snapshot of
the best of poetry’s goings-on. Cate Marvin’s ode to the power of
Nyquil is both funny and unsettling and Cathleen Calbert’s “Fox
Wife” is sexy and haunting: “Fox trickery? / You mean grapes / and
what appears / to be a pool of water? / The way the wind calls /
your wife’s name? / What of your gods? / You think they don’t /
litter the sky / with riddles?” Albert Goldbarth writes in his
“Stepper,” “Every day… / the dust of Asia Minor caking in one’s
hair. / All night, for 1700 miles of nights… the cold slopes / of
the Hindu Kush against one’s cheek, / until the flesh takes on the
feel of rock. Some / never returned as themselves. This / is
evidently what needs to be done / if you’re going to conquer the
world.” While POOL may not be climbing Hindu Kush, they seem
to be on the right path for conquering the world—the poetry world,
at least. [POOL, P.O. Box 49738, Los Angeles, CA 90049.
webmaster@poolpoetry.com. Single issue $10.
www.poolpoetry.com ]
—Dan Brady
Slipstream
Number 25
2005
Annual
“I can sometimes almost read the inscriptions on brick walls, in doorways, between/ the wing blades of pigeons.” So writes Yvonne C. Murphy, in her poem “Avenue of the Strongest.” Slipstream No. 25, a journal, as always, consisting solely of poetry, is rife with equal allusions to both the body and to the written word, both in crude and refined forms. At first this seems a strange set of motifs to underline a journal. But a second look finds body and text not altogether removed, and, in fact, a relatively popular contemporary discussion. See Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body, see post-modernism/post-structuralism, see Ani Difranco’s song “Both Hands.” While I wasn’t entirely impressed by this issue, I can’t say I was entirely unimpressed either. But so is the case when multiple authors’ work colludes to form the sort of miniature anthology that is a journal. Stephen A. Polermo’s poem “Conjoined” treats a dominant, fetal twin who consumed his twin brother in utero, as a hero, for foreseeing his brother’s malady and malformations before birth and doing something about it to avoid his brother’s suffering. This is, of course, an uncomfortable thought, but one that, at the same time, offers a sort of harrowing benediction. Ran Webber’s contemporary, disturbing, and reflective sketches adorn a few of Slipstream’s pages, offering readers a reprieve from the weighty subject matter of the issue’s poems, if not thematically, then in terms of senses most used when experiencing said artwork. Slipstream No. 25 takes risks, and while sometimes these risks are a little much, I applaud the journal for succeeding on more than one occasion. [Slipstream, P.O. Box 2071, Dept. W-1, Niagara Falls, NY 14301. Single issue $7. www.slipstreampress.org] —Erin M. Bertram
Western
Humanities Review
Volume 59 Number 2
Fall 2005
Biannual
When a journal has the term “Review” in the title, chances are what you’ll find inside tends more toward the academic than the artistic, because they usually hail from a university setting. While I can’t speak of Western Humanities Review on the whole, since Fall 2005 is my introductory issue to WHR, this edition braids academic and artistic sensibilities nicely—especially in certain pieces, not so especially in others. This is less than surprising for a journal, since, while they may center around a general theme, journals, by loose definition, are collections of various people’s work, garnering a relatively eclectic mix, which they should. Western Humanities Review fits this definition like a glove. There is a strong focus in this issue on inter-genre literature. Essays about a novel-pairing, one by Gertrude Stein with another by Christine Brooke-Rose; poems inspired by and for Arnold Shoenberg, Fritz Lang, Anna Akhmatova, and Hart Crane; a short story written in the air of, though not exactly about, film noir. Each of these works points tastefully toward their inspiration, without leaning too much on that work of art, or that artist, for balance. And in the midst, a poem by Nick Norwood entitled “Fellatio: An Ode,” reminiscent of Charles Jensen’s poem “Upon Discovering The Actual Meaning Of Penisbreath,” and not because both poems refer to the same geographical region, but because they take risky material and present it in such a way that allows the poem to be taken seriously as itself. This issue of Western Humanities Review offers readers just that—serious literature that doesn’t take itself too seriously, or does so just enough to remain accessible. [Western Humanities Review, University of Utah English Department, 255 S. Central Campus Drive, Room 3500, Salt Lake City, UT 84112-10494. E-mail: whr@mail.hum.utah.edu. Single issue $12. www.hum.utah.edu/whr/] —Erin M. Bertram
Reviewers - Contributors Notes
NewPages Literary Magazine Stand Archives
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